Open door

Sub conscious

Subeditors have nearly always had a bad press. The good they do is oft interred with their bones. Who can forget the scathing description in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, of the room where "...subeditors busied themselves with the humdrum task of reducing to blank nonsense the sheaves of misinformation"?

And how wounding the heavy irony of PG Wodehouse's exchange between Psmith and "Comrade Windsor" as the revolution at Cosy Moments is planned: "By the way," said Psmith, "what is your exact position on this paper? Practically, we know well, you are its backbone, its life-blood; but what is your technical position?..."

"I'm sub-editor."

"Merely sub? You deserve a more responsible post than that... Where is your proprietor? I must buttonhole him and point out to him what a wealth of talent he is allowing to waste itself. You must have scope." (From Psmith, Journalist).

The subeditor sits, is a sitting duck you might say, between the writer and the page or section editor. It is the subeditor who checks the reporter's copy for grammatical and, so far as it is possible, factual errors. A sub is not expected to reresearch a story or, indeed, to carry out research where insufficient appears to have been done. It is the subeditor who cuts copy to the required size (a creative skill not to be undervalued), writes headlines and captions and, in certain cases, who lays out the page, articulating the headings, stories, pictures and graphics to reflect his/her or the section editor's priorities in a structure of asymmetrical balance.

In the end the page has to look good, to convey the weight and sense of its contents clearly, and to provide a text free from linguistic obstacles. Subbing may be a sedentary occupation but it is not a passive one. The sub (in an ideal world) sets alertly forth each day, avid for its curiosities. It is one of those occupations in which a measure of success is the degree to which the practitioner is rendered invisible.

All the work is now done on a computer. There are no printers, dangerously armed with scalpels. The journalist has assumed the responsibility for the whole show. The computer skills which a subeditor is called upon to exercise are considerable. Indeed, I have heard it suggested that one reason why so many mistakes get into the paper is because the technical demands on the subeditor are now so great that attention is diverted from the content. There is little evidence for that. Indeed the deputy editor (news) believes that in the past couple of years, through the period of the introduction of the latest wave of technology, subbing standards on the paper have risen. Other pressures, produced by the size of today's papers, are perhaps more to the point.

The traditional cry in newspapers, half joking, half serious, when something went wrong was "Blame the subs." I mentioned their position as sitting ducks between editors and writers. But to what extent are they really to blame for the paper's lapses, for the kind of things that fill the daily corrections and clarifications column?

I carried out a rough analysis of 100 consecutive entries in the corrections column. It is rare that 100% of the blame for a mistake devolves on to one person. Everything that goes in the paper is seen by several people: the writer, the page editor, the subeditor, in the newsroom usually by another journalist who revises where necessary, and then by someone who reads a proof of the whole page. So my rough survey was to apportion the main responsibility for error. You may find the result surprising.

The greater number of entries, about 50, were due to mistakes made by the writers and which I judged to be not readily detectable by a subeditor. The second category, about 30, was a miscellany in which the responsibility belonged mainly to the page or section editors, the graphics department, production and (even) to me. Only 20 of the 100 entries could fairly be attributed to a failure in subediting - I included all the grammatical errors and homophones in this category.

Of course, not all errors are corrected, including many spelling mistakes. However, I think the general picture the figures provide is probably a true one: some of us, readers as well as journalists, may need to revise our view of subeditors.

If any group has the power to reduce the number of mistakes it is, I suggest, the writers. I don't think the employment of fact-checkers, in the way that they are used in the US, would necessarily help much. I rang one contributor, a well known author, to check something and got her partner. "Good God, I'm not calling her to the phone for that. This is fact-checking gone mad. She's a writer."